Harriet Robinson Scott (House Divided)

Sources
The online Dred Scott Case Collection (Missouri State Archives & Washington University) contains over 100 documents and provides information on trials from the first Circuit Court Case in 1846 to the Supreme Court decision in 1857. In addition, the St. Louis Circuit Court Historical Records Project created the “Freedom Suits Case Files, 1814-1860,” which has 301 petitions from individuals who attempted to prove in court that they were free. Other books and pamphlets are online at the Library of Congress’ Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860 collection and at Cornell University’s Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection. In addition, you can read the full opinions of all Supreme Court justices in Benjamin Chew Howard’s Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the Supreme Court of the United States (1857). Other primary sources include Thomas Hart Benton’s Historical and Legal Examination of that Part of Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the Dred Scott Case (1857) and Paul Finkelman’s Dred Scott v. Sandford: A Brief History with Documents (1997).

The best secondary source on Harriet Scott is Lea VanderVelde’s Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery’s Frontier (2009). Other important secondary sources on the case include Don E. Fehrenbacher’s The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (1978), Walter Ehrlich’s They Have No Rights: Dred Scott’s Struggle for Freedom (1979), Mark A. Graber’s Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil (2006), and David Thomas Konig’s “The Long Road to Dred Scott: Personhood and the Rule of Law in the Trial Court Records of St. Louis Slave Freedom Suits,” UMKC Law Review (Fall 2006).

Places to Visit
In St. Louis the courthouse where the first two Dred Scott trials were held is part of the National Park Service’s Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. Once inside the courthouse you can see the “Legacy of Courage: Dred Scott & the Quest for Freedom” exhibit. For more information, see the Old Courthouse section of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial website. A photo gallery of the Old Courthouse is available here.

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